Out of print

Australian publishers know the digital revolution is upon them and they need to change their ways. But the future is anything but easy to read.

By Kathy Evans

August 28, 2011 — 12.00am

ZOE Dattner is a publisher, but this year she has only read two books. This seems a rather scandalous confession, considering her profession, but thankfully she is talking about p-books, the old-fashioned paper variety, which she makes sound rather quaint.

''I am really enjoying the experience,'' she says of the current book she's reading - an advance copy of Melbourne writer Wayne Macauley's latest work: ''It feels like it's just me and the book rather than me and the internet.'' As co-founder of Melbourne publishing house Sleepers, of course Dattner reads a lot; it's just that the books she reads these days are mainly downloaded via an iPad or an iPhone.

The digital revolution is here.

It suits her; living in a miner's cottage in rural Victoria, miles from any decent bookshop, a good read is only a mouse click away. Dattner is a Thoroughly Modern Publisher in a landscape which, having changed very little since the days of Gutenberg, is suddenly and spectacularly erupting. After watching closely what happened overseas, Australian publishers are waking up to the fact - some say slowly - that the future is digital and they are in danger of being left behind.

Already there are many potential new platforms for content, aside from that much loved and reliable old technology, the book. There's everything from Kindles and Kobos to sophisticated phones, Apple iPads with interactive graphics and computers that can morph from television portal to e-reader to web browser and back again. The Australian Booksellers Association expects e-books to account for up to 25 per cent of the market by 2015. Recently Amazon announced that Kindle e-book sales have now surpassed all its hard-copy book sales combined, selling 105 digital copies for every 100 printed ones. So what does all this mean for Australian publishers? After all the hype and speculation predicting a digital book revolution, are they, like Dattner, more than e-ready for such a big change?

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This year has undoubtedly been a worrying time for the Australian book industry, with the collapse of REDgroup Retail in February and the closure of 96 Borders and Angus & Robertson stores. While REDgroup bosses identified online book selling and a consumer spending downturn as among the reasons for its troubles, many independent bookshop owners were scathing about its business practices and inability to connect with the local market; so much so that the joke was that you could buy a barbecue at Borders. But it's not all doom and gloom; the collapse triggered a regeneration of local independent bookstores, which are popping up across the country like new shoots on a scorched landscape.

According to Dattner, there is nowhere else in the world with such an abundance: ''Now is a really good chance for booksellers and a lot of them are feeling inspired.''

But are the publishers? Last month a survey by the Copyright Agency Limited revealed that while its members welcomed this brave new world, there were some serious concerns. While two-thirds of those questioned believe digital sales will overtake print, 26 per cent of publishers have no ''digital strategy'' at all. One member summed it up with the comment, ''Time for me to become more proactive. But how?'' The survey of 2000 publishers and authors also highlighted common concerns, namely around piracy, technology and the dominance of multinationals. Says the agency's strategy manager Michael Lijic: ''It's just knowing where to start. There are so many competing services and conflicting information. Do you go with the big overseas providers like Apple or Google or do you use Australian services? It's early days for the market as well. As time goes on these issues will sort themselves out but right now there is confusion, especially among the small players.''

The fear is that companies such as Amazon are hell-bent on reducing publishers to a chain of sweatshops, with authors playing the role of the callused-fingered flip-flop maker.

''When you are negotiating with Amazon it's like negotiating with 50 countries on the planet joined together,'' says Henry Rosenbloom, owner of Melbourne-based Scribe Publications. ''There is a great disparity in resources and heft.

''It's a power relationship problem. When you enter into negotiations with one of the gorillas every clause favours them and not you, so you have to think very hard about every single word and every single phrase, and what you can live with and what you can't; what you need and what you don't need. That's very difficult. Big houses have access to high-paid legal support and small houses don't. Assuming you are an experienced business person you can work your way through it, but there is an implicit disparity that you can't get around. It's inevitable there will be sticking points where the big, US-based retailers won't budge, and they will be sticking points that we can't accept.''

When asked what they are, Rosenbloom refuses to be drawn but he adds: ''That's one of the reasons why there aren't many deals that have been done in Australia between the Australian publishing houses and the big overseas e-book sellers, because we have been negotiating and talking to these people for some time and it's intrinsically a difficult process. We are trying to protect the interests of our authors, let alone ourselves, and trying to be realistic about the marketplace.''

ONE way to get around it is for small, independent publishers to cosy up with local retailers. Dattner is also manager of SPUNC (the small press network), which late last year joined forces with Readings to launch Australia's first major independent e-book store Booki.sh. This is an attempt to bring small publishers into the digital environment and help them compete with the giants. For small publishers, joining Amazon, she says, can feel like getting sucked into a large, dark hole. Booki.sh, which currently has about 2000 e-titles from publishers both big and small, offers a much more intimate experience. Also waiting in the wings is Australian outfit ReadCloud, which boasts on its website that its offering a way for ''even the smallest bookstores to go online and sell e-books''. It currently has about 30 independent book stores signed up for its launch in October.

Dattner points out that when it comes to adapting to technology, small publishers may actually have the advantage over large ones because they are nimble, quick and small. ''With big publishers it's hard to make any kind of big change in terms of the supply chain; they have to wait to hear from head office, which is the other side of the world; it's a very unwieldy, slow-moving thing.''

One area where publishers great and small are united is in their concern about pirating. Once you move into a digital environment you are much more exposed to someone nicking your work. Maree McCaskill, CEO of the Australian Publishers Association, says she gets calls every day about illegal photocopies being sold or pirated copies of textbooks.

''Everyone is in love with the internet and the fact that you can get all your stuff instantly and everything happens at the snap of your fingers. However, what has got lost in all of this is that content, whether it be digital or printed form, is someone's work, somebody's job, it is how they earn their living. If people say I'm living like a dinosaur, I say, 'What would you think if I went to a carpenter's ute and stole their tools, which prevented them from doing their building work?' It's theft.''

Even the most rigorous Digital Rights Management technologies, which aim to prevent work being copied, are not watertight. McCaskill says it will take a generation of education for people to learn that e does not equal free. When the heyday of the Napster-nabbing years subsided, many lessons were learnt, namely that price remains the best weapon against piracy.

Says Dattner: ''We go to work and we get paid, so we can buy stuff that makes us happy; it's a method of transaction that's been going on for thousands of years. People actually want to exchange their money for something because it gives value to what they've been doing during the day. However, I believe pirating is much more of a concern for the blockbusters than it is for smaller works. They're the sort of books that are going to get pirated.''

IF PRICING is one of the best weapons against piracy, one thing that publishers and authors are agreed on is that the current low cost of e-books is untenable. Says McCaskill: ''Companies like Amazon are designed to exact the best deal for themselves. Australian publishers have to bargain pretty hard to get the best deal for their authors and publishers to make money on it. I predict prices will go up because they have used it as a loss leader to establish a market and it's not sustainable.''

Which means at least writers can mop their brows in relief. ''It's the biggest killer for authors,'' says Angelo Loukakis, of the Australian Society of Authors. ''The phenomenon of the $2 or $3 book is driving prices down and there is an expectation building that that's an acceptable price for a book. It may be an acceptable price for the consumer but it's not for the author, who can't live on that sort of money.''

When an e-book is sold online, an amount is remitted back to the publisher, which is then split with the author. Typically the author gets only about 20-25 per cent of the amount remitted back to the publisher, which means if the deal is weak, then they are going to feel the squeeze.

On the plus side, writers are exposed to a global audience they could only dream of before. Links to their work can pop up on Google topic-related searches, or seep into Twitter feeds; no longer are they at the mercy of booksellers scratching their heads and saying: ''Sorry, never heard of you.'' Says Dattner: ''Authors can be a lot more involved from the comfort of their own seclusion, which is where many authors like to be. Not all of them like, or by their own admission, are good at, publicity tours.''

Authors are also excited about the opportunities for self-publishing. Fed up with rejection, unable to get their manuscripts past the bouncers at the big publishing houses, or feeding off royalty scraps, the notion of being able to dodge the stuffed suits and hang on to more of their earnings is very appealing. But is it realistic?

''Self-publishing will grow, yes,'' concedes McCaskill. ''The difficulty will be getting through the vast amount of material to find the good stuff. There are thousands of people out there who think they have written the next bestseller. A lot of the good work will still come through publishers because they will take a punt on finding someone with absolute talent and making sure they have the assistance to produce it properly and do their sales or marketing work for them.''

SO WHAT is the next stage of publishing's metamorphosis? Up until the middle of the last century, it was still a gentleman's affair, a leisurely activity that cared more about proclaiming the glory of well-known authors or discovering new talents than about making any profit from the editing process. In latter years, the gentleman (it was always a gentleman) stepped aside from his hobby and Big Business stepped in.

Staring into the crystal ball, McCaskill predicts even more radical changes ahead; we are merely at the start. She sees afuture where the title ''publisher'' is up for grabs, with communication giants like Vodafone and Amazon muscling in. A book, she reminds us, is simply a way of packaging content. Digital natives see their content packaged differently. ''The way in which we consume things is changing. There will always be publishers, it's just that the landscape will change. The heads of publishing houses today will be very different to the ones of the future; the publishers of tomorrow will focus on technology.''

But interestingly, techno-savvy Dattner is sceptical. ''I believe we will see fast-food results and the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I am a firm believer in the editorial process and I don't believe that Amazon is passionate about that. It is not going to be the publisher of choice for somebody who really wants their work to be well placed or well crafted by the editors and publishers and the sales team.

''It's like when they invented the deep fryer and everyone went, 'Wow! What a creation!' And everything - no matter how bad or revolting the quality - tasted great when fried. All around the world there was terrible food being passed off as great food, but there were lots of people who knew it was bad.''

Could it be the end of the book? Who knows, but it's not the end of the story.

Dattner says she is forever being told that ''publishing is dead'' but for her there is nothing further from the truth.

''We are in a unique position in Australia,'' she says. ''Maybe it's because of our pioneering spirit, or maybe because of the tyranny of distance where export is so difficult. We have had to find our own ways of being creative, of establishing our cultural worth. I think we will continue to do so.''

She reminds us that human beings will always find ways to tell stories; we can't help ourselves, it's part of our make-up. And while simple, stand-alone yarns will always suffice, every generation wants to find new ways of telling them.

''It sounds a bit cold, but everyone has to adapt in order to make money out of the thing we are most passionate about.''